- The Observer, Sunday 2 May 1993
The hailstorm of abuse that has stung down upon the list of 'best' 20 British novelists under 40 promoted by Granta magazine has obscured the particular writers in general contempt. Many of the chosen 20 are being attacked for failing to represent The Novel. As is clear from reading the books, they represent no-one but themselves. And perhaps that lack of tradition (today we have no groups of angry young men or minimalists, no camps of dirty realists or modernists) is actually a good thing: not one mainstream but a pattern of tributaries which will eventually water a larger area of literary ground.
Moreover, it is not clear how many of the harsh critical commentators, particularly those who rushed into print immediately, had actually read the books that the judges (Bill Buford, A. S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie and John Mitchinson) selected. It seemed, instead, as if the mouth of preconception was agape, waiting to chomp up whatever bait came its way. Not surprisingly, many of the novels by the selected 20 can be snagged by the ready judgments (narrowly personal, nostalgic and engaged by past rather than present, tritely informed by magic real ism, too literary). Some of them, however, were revelations to me.
Lists are always problems: too neat apparently inclusive but actually gaping with omissions. (My wails are: what about Charlotte Cory, Paul Watkins, Patrick Gale, Adam Thorpe?) Is the list the judges' subjective choice, the attempt at objective assessment of The State of The Novel, a publicity wheeze, a waving of the British flag? Or is it a kind of shopping list (try some of these, they might bring you pleasure)?
There are particular problems too. Is 40 too old, or too young? A.S. Byatt was anxious that women tend to start writing later than men, in the cracks of their domestic days. Can a novelist be someone who has written only short stories? Also, does one novel make a novelist? Perhaps it should take three books to indicate the shape of a writer. Malcolm Lowry would have romped onto this promotion with his first novel, John Updike would not.
I've always been uneasy about the notion of a literary tradition it smacks too much of a literary establishment (something women have anyway been excluded from). The greatest literature often bursts in from the margins, grows up from parched pavements rather than from well-tended beds. Writers are solitary creatures, and though some fine work has emerged from writing courses and literary coteries, most still happens in silent loneliness. The best novelists make their own countries which we critics then colonise into a map, the better not to get lost.
Anne Billson has been the most abused of the bunch, but Suckers a tale about an outbreak of vampirism in Eighties London was clearly never meant to be more than a savage romp. Anne Billson has a nice sneer, some bon mots, a lot of over-simplistic moralising and a good deal of spirit. It should have been dealt neither accolade nor scorn.
Helen Simpson's collection of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed, is a sour, bleak and wry-funny look at love or what stands in for love. Most of the slim tales lie in the crease between glossy romantic expectations and dandruffy real life, or between lust's brief dazzlement and the long-term disillusion of marriage. Her women suffer and rage hate flares from a simple word or the sight of a blackhead being squeezed on the wing of a nostril. Simpson writes deliciously but these short stories cannot mark out the full scope of her talent.
Will Self firecrackered to critical attention with his collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, a macabre and exact group of satires. His novel, Cock and Bull, is actually made up of two trendy novellas about a woman who grows a penis (and starts raping men) and a man who grows a vagina in the back of his rugby-toughened knee. (His behaviour softens he lets himself be abused.) Will Self's tone is cold. He examines sex lives with a well-lubricated sexual disgust, and is playful like a bully in the school yard. He's clever, but should not be on the list.
Tibor Fischer's first novel, Under the Frog, is a delicate, comic and moving account of life in Hungary in the years preceding the 1956 uprising. (A Hungarian expression for the worst place to be is 'under a frog's arse down a coalmine'.) Fischer is in his early thirties, was born in Stockport and educated at Cambridge but this novel has a remarkable authenticity and authority about an experience Fischer never lived through, and a meticulous, foreign-seeming formality about its prose. Good but not big enough for this list.
Lawrence Norfolk's Lempriere's Dictionary is perhaps the one book among the debuts that contains enough breadth and ambition to merit inclusion. It is like a symphony rather than just a pleasing tune. Norfolk is 29 his precocious achievement is a love story, an adventure story, a work of scrupulously-researched and finely-imagined history (from 1600 to the eve of the French Revolution) and a cultural meditation. It is dense with detail, but never shows off, never slows down, and is wonderfully gripping.
A. L. Kennedy was a lovely surprise to me: I'd never read her before, didn't know she was Scottish, didn't even know whether she was a man or a woman. From the first pages of Looking for a Possible Dance we sense a uniquely female sensibility a bruised, scarred and gallant confrontation with a difficult world. This is the story of Margaret, who is loved by two men her father, who teaches her how to dance but dies, and her lover Colin but who doesn't really know how to love back. A. L. Kennedy writes in an emotional and direct prose she holds close to language like a dancer, takes you into spins of tenderness or grief.
Alan Hollinghurst hasn't added to his single novel, The Swimming Pool Library, which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1989 (although his next novel, The Folding Star, is due to be published in 1994 which may confirm his place on the list), so that this clever and fiercely erotic evocation of pre-Aids relationships among gays stands as his single fine achievement and one whose meaning changes tragically with the changing meaning of our times.
Adam Mars-Jones has, of course, been here before. He made it onto the 1983 list with his memorable collection of stories, Lantern Lecture. Monopolies of Loss adds the bitter to Lantern Lecture's sweet they are tender and often agonising stories about Aids. But we need the novel, Water of Thirst (out in the summer) before we can properly assess his achievement.
Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia takes you by the lapels and stares at you straight. If, as many critics stated, it is a work of autobiography (growing up with Pakistani parents in London suburbia a kind of love-hate song to childhood and the city, jazzy, moody and intense), then it is autobiography hammered into a bold and clean fictional shape. It will be interesting to see how far Kureishi can travel from the roads of his own life.
Esther Freud has written only two novels, and they too are thinly disguised autobiographies. She needs now to stretch her undoubted talent after Hideous Kinky (a child growing up in the Sixties) and Peerless Flats (a teenager growing up in the Seventies). Both novels are immensely attractive: graceful, unshowy, undramatic and good-natured. Esther Freud's third novel will show us where she's headed: the Tarmaced road of coming to adulthood in the Eighties, or less charted and more adventurous terrains.
Candia McWilliam's first novel, A Case of Knives, received vituperative and rapturous reviews in equal measure so did her second, A Little Stranger. It's not hard to see why reactions are so polarised: the books are strange, garish, self-consciously literary, poised, hard-hearted and socially precise. The wrought-iron gates of her fictional world clanged shut against me, though the view through the bars is impressive.
Nicholas Shakespeare's first novel, The Vision of Elena Silves, owed much to South American writing. His new one, The High Flyer, begins with a homage to 1984, as the clock on the bell-tower of an African town announces the time casually, after a pattern of its own, and then moves into Graham Greene land (an ageing diplomat in a dusty African country, flies and apes and intrigue and dirt, memories of a love affair, knowledge of failure). But Shakespeare makes of his subject something different: wearily emotional, impressionistic, good on the heat of desire, but weak at its abrupt ending.
Louis de Bernieres's novels also feel the winds of South American writing and magic realism, but without any sense of staleness. Reading de Bernieres gave me the warm shock of discovery. Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord is a novel set in a country that feels like Columbia. What begins as a novel of beguiling optimism turns into tragedy international politics in head-on collision with love. Why have we so badly neglected de Bernieres until now?
Caryl Phillips is a political writer: his blackness gives him roots and an anger that many of the other young writers lack. His latest novel, Crossing the River, is an ambitious exploration of oppression, loss and reconciliation that employs a collage of styles and ranges across continents and centuries. But in the end it is too schematic to hold the imagination: Phillips should have thrown away his notes and plunged into the worlds he describes.
Adam Lively has, until now, been a well-reviewed writer who has not quite managed to grab the critical limelight. Sing the Body Electric should change that: it is a novel of enormous energy and originality about music, passion, the fragile life of the mind and the future. It manages to be both epic and casual it is a s complex and simple as the works its central character wants to write, and it marks a new stage in his career.
Philip Kerr is a surprise inclusion, if only because he writes thrillers, a genre rarely accorded literary honours. His first three books are all dense, intelligent and traditional crime novels his latest, A Philosophical Investigation, aims higher. It is set in the twenty-first century, when a wave of serial killings is terrorising hi-tech, data-based London. The killer's code name is Wittgenstein his victims are de Quincy, Shakespeare, Socrates, Orwell . . . The novel is clever and quick, but never quite takes off from the over-lit runway of ideas.
Kazuo Ishiguro was included on the Best of British 10 years ago for A Pale View of Hills. His output since then has not been great only An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day but each is a quietly beautiful work, combining social observation with lyricism.
Ben Okri was never properly noticed until he won the 1991 Booker Prize with The Famished Road. It was an unexpected and controversial award, for this novel, which combines fantasy with the here-and-now, is like an epic poem without the line-breaks unlinear, stuffed with dreams and allegory, visionary, and sometimes drifting from paragraph to beautiful paragraph. It's a hopeful book, full of memorable passages. But it is like a necklace which comes unstrung in your hands. He was the one writer who left me doubtful about his inclusion on the list.
Iain Banks is the most prolific of the 20, with nine novels (including three science fictions) published and two more at the printers. His first is also his best-known. The Wasp Factory is the curdling account of 16-year-old Frank and his very sick private life. The book has lost some of its slasher-punk shock value since its publication in 1984 but retains its surreal nastiness. I loathed it but think his inclusion amply justified.
Jeanette Winterson takes risks, always sets herself new challenges and can write in the most heart-catching prose. Her novels are, in their lightness (I mean light like a sponge cake, or a perfect souffle), in danger of being cliched or self-indulgent. The Passion and Sexing the Cherry are both miraculously uncollapsed books. Her latest, Written on the Body, dips badly, although it still contains some lovely passages and acute insights. It is an extended meditation on the love affair between radiant Louise and the nameless, ungendered narrator. Love, we are meant to see, can rise beyond gender to become that mysterious, transcendent affair of the unsexed heart all very well if you believe that the heart is unsexed or that gender can ever slip away in the meeting of souls.
